- There is no perceived IT generation gap: Young people really are thick • The Register – The middle-aged Register speaks to the medicare-aged retiring. There's more time to stay further in front of the curve when you're old.
> The kids of my day bantered in rhyming slang and Nadsat; these days they speak StartUp and DipShit.
> Age has nothing to do with the definition of culture.
> In fact, the whole age thing is overrated if you ask me. All my neighbours are long retired but they are completely up to date on modern culture, from AI in healthcare to Facebook’s naughtiness. OK, admittedly one of them thought Stormy Daniels was a rapping conjurer but that’s what you get when you strike up conversation in the automated till queue at Waitrose.
> It’s simply because most people are thick. I realise now that I’m not an old geezer worried that modern culture has left him behind. I’m just a snob. Phew! I can live with that. – (culture )
- [toread] An Apology for the Internet — From the People Who Built It – – (history )
- [toread] Fandom, Feminism, and Maker Pedagogy – – (maker_pedagogy making )
- Civil war erupts at top of FCC over Sinclair’s creepy grasp on US telly – > "We need to stand up, speak out, and call out when government is being used as a tool to attack the conditions that make it possible for news to serve as a check on power," said Rosenworcel. "We cannot allow the cry of fake news to extinguish our inquiry into hard subjects, diminish our willingness to seek truth, or temper our support for the First Amendment." – (fcc freespeech )
- 25 Years of EdTech – 2003: Blogs – – (#en3177 )
- RSS is undead – Reasons to love RSS: no branding, no user analytics, no ads, user rather than provider curation. Content. – (socialpractices reading marketing rss )
- The Final Surrender of Anti-Trump Conservatism – “An authoritarian can be a Republican in good standing.” Not really a novel conclusion. But conservative support for Trump has revealed the anti-democratic ideology at its core. – (authoritarianism politics trump )
- The Fall of the TV Family in Trump’s America | WIRED – The TV family sitcom never was a forum for debate. The Beaver never sat dow with Wally and had it out. Rosanne has was a Snidely Whiplash melodrama.
> rushed through on the way to the next joke – (none)
- 25 Years of EdTech – 2000: Learning objects – LO couldn't die fast enough. Locally, they were pushed top down by admins looking for standardization. Pedagogically, the problem was decontextualization that drained them of worth outside of training. – (open_learning learningobjects )
- Better than the Printed Page: Reading on an iPad – Modding the iPad for reading. – (ipad reading visual_perception )
- Language Log » Cultural diffusion and the Whorfian hypothesis – Co-diffusion as a mechanism – (Linguistic_change classification linguistics )
Author Archives: morgan
What I’m reading 8 Feb 2018 – 9 Mar 2018
- 25 years of EdTech – 1998: Wikis – Martin Weller reminds us that wikis didn’t take off in education – but not without effort from a lot of us. Effort that went on from 2003 here: http://erhetoric.org/WeblogsAndWikis . Why would wiki fail? Wikis are easy to work on, but wiki-writing is hard. It doesn’t have to be hard, but the dominant rhetoric pushes against the provisional, speculative, slowly-evolving-over-time, communal work that wikis support. – (wikis edtech #en3177 )
- Project 1: Andy Campbell’s “The Flat” | Digital Fiction – Close reading and analysis of The Flat digilit. Discovers aporia / epiphany dialectic and uses that to inform the reading. Time waits for no- – (#en3177 digitallierature )
- Last blog standing, “last guy dancing”: How Jason Kottke is thinking about kottke.org at 20 » Nieman Journalism Lab – – (#en3177 en3177 )
- David Gergen: President Trump’s attacks on media pose ‘growing’ threat to America – Feb. 18, 2018 – > "This is what splits a country apart," he added. "In many other countries, it's been the beginnings of an authoritarian rule. And that's the larger threat hanging over us now…I find that the threat is growing."
> "We think our democracy can survive anything, but these things happen slowly and then suddenly," Pfeiffer said. – (trump fascism rhetoric )
- “Wasn’t I a Great Candidate?”: Inside Mar-a-Lago, Trump Burns as Mueller Brings More Charges | Vanity Fair – Reading the sequence and timing of Trump's tweets: This is what kairos can tell you. – (trump erhetoric )
- Top U.S. officials tell the world to ignore Trump’s tweets – The Washington Post – Dateline Munich + foreign policy + trump means pay attention.
> One diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid provoking Trump, asked whether policymakers like McMaster who adhere largely to traditional U.S. foreign policy positions were falling into the same trap as Germany’s elite during Hitler’s rise, when they continued to serve in government in the name of protecting their nation. – (trump politics fascism )
- #engageMOOC – The Schedule – Antigonish 2.0 – – (engageMOOC #en3177 )
- Recognition Is Futile: Why Checklist Approaches to Information Literacy Fail and What To Do About It – A. Checklists are always a sign of non-education. B. Engagement is required. C. Heuristics and material practice count. – (fakenews openeducation mooc #en3177 education infoliteracy )
- Donald Trump’s Words Are Reshaping American Politics – The Atlantic – > Politics is downstream from persuasion, and law is downstream from language. Trump has failed to perform the role of a diligent executive, reserving much of his day for television, personal calls, and cultural encyclicals on Twitter. – (trump politics rhetoric )
- Fake news has a long history. Beware the state being keeper of ‘the truth’ | Kenan Malik | Opinion | The Guardian – The fear isn’t Trump’s proclamation but the government’s endorsement. I blame the coffee houses. – (history socialmedia freespeech )
- Home taping revisited: A mic in each hand, pointing at speakers • The Register – My nostalgia. When singles fought back at prog rock, and we taped the whole thing. In low fi. C30 C60 C90. – (music )
- Remember the Yorkie pizza horror? Here’s who won our exclusive Reg merch… – The Reg goes socio-culinary. – (food )
- Psychogeography – Geography – Oxford Bibliographies – A bibliographic entry – (psychogeography situationalism )
- What is Psychogeography? — Steemit – > "Psychogeography is the study of the effects of geographical settings, consciously managed or not, acting directly on the mood and behaviour of the individual”.
> Détournment is a dialectical tool. It is an "insurrectional style" by which a past form is used to show its own inherent untruth– an untruth masked by ideology. It can be applied to billboards, written texts, films, cartoons, blog posts, etc., as well as to city spaces. – (psychogeography dialectic )
- Psychogeography – From a cartographer
>- diverse activities that raise awareness of the natural and cultural environment around you
– attentive to senses and emotions as they relate to place and environment
serious fun
– often political and critical of the status quoWith examples of mapping emotions. – (psychogeography derive )
- Psychogeography – With a turn towards the revolutionary. China
> Psychogeography is the effect of place upon the psyche and the importance of the psyche within the landscape. The term was first discussed in the early 1950s by Guy Debord of the Situationist International, who attributed its coining to “an illiterate Kabyle.” The concept itself is simple, ancient, and foundational to an animist view of the world. – (psychogeography dialectic )
What I’m reading 29 Oct 2017 – 6 Feb 2018
- The truth about Donald Trump’s jokes – CNNPolitics – Calling it a joke makes Sanders and the other functionaries complicit. Just following orders. But it’s an attempt at making us all complicit. The language of dictators.
> More importantly, though, is the rhetorical usefulness of playing off a smiling accusation — of treason, a capital offense — as a gag. To start, it immediately diminishes those who find it upsetting. Implicit in Sanders' defense is a taunt: What's wrong, can't take a joke? It's a conversation ender, and for Trump, one he used successfully on his way to the White House and in his first year in the job. – (none)
- Trump’s Dangerous Treason Accusation Against Democrats – The Atlantic – Call the opposition treasonous. Then add a military parade. What do you have?
> But (and this is important), there’s no reason a federal employee can’t criticize a sitting president.
This isn't a Sun King. This is not a joke. It's 1939. – (rhetoric trump )
- Calling the Trump Era by Its Proper Name – The Atlantic – Naming matters. Action n comes of naming.
> Or it is time to call this era flat-out a return to fascism.
> For him that is not “populism” (or the U.S. version, “economic anxiety,”) nor garden-variety corruption nor even longer-term democratic distress. Instead it is the reawakening of the force that began destroying Europe a century ago, outright fascism:
The term populism, being the preferred description for a modern-day revolt of the masses, will not provide any meaningful understanding concerning that phenomenon … The use of the term populist is only one more way to cultivate the denial that the ghost of fascism is haunting our societies again and to deny the fact that liberal democracies have turned into their opposite: mass democracies deprived of the spirit of democracy. – (trump naming rhetoric categorization politics )
- The Psychological Trick Behind Trump’s Misleading Terror Statistics – POLITICO Magazine – A psychologist tries a hand at rhetorical analysis.
> People perceive risk based largely on emotion, and terrorism is unquestionably frightening.
It’s about the rhetor, not the audience, in this case. An admin that knowingly plays an audience the way the admin does is engaged in more than a trick. – (politics rhetoric ethos trump )
- Donald Trump Owns This Shutdown | The Nation – I love an essay loaded with goads. It simplifies analysis. – (rhetoric politics trump )
- Blogging Practices: An Analytical Framework | Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication | Oxford Academic – – (blogging socialpractices #en3177 )
- Study: 42 percent of Republicans believe accurate — but negative — stories qualify as ‘fake news’ – The Washington Post – – (none)
- London’s new US embassy: a very diplomatic America on Thames | Art and design | The Guardian – Architecture speaks volumes.
> The new embassy is bland, vanilla, just as a diplomatic dinner is rarely riotous and a diplomatic speech is rarely spellbinding. Its use of art and nature and decoration are somewhat Starbucks – a grande vanilla latte then – and with approximately the same relation to real architecture as that has to real coffee. Timberlake’s multiple objectives are all good and worthy, but like wishing for world peace and an end to hunger are a touch platitudinous. They also contain the occasional conflict and contradiction – most obviously between being fortified and being nice – which the architects have chosen to smooth over rather than dramatise. The basic shape of the building is a cube, which Timberlake explains as being a timeless form. It does give the embassy a presence, but – because it minimises the amount of expensive external skin in relation to the volume – it also happens to be the most efficient shape for an office building. – (london ekphrasis trump )
- The fabulous new US embassy is best not tainted by a Trump visit | Oliver Wainwright | Opinion | The Guardian – Now on my must-visit list.
> Nine Elms was a shrewd choice. It was one of the only places in London where the US could dictate the evolution of a masterplan that would put its shimmering cube at the centre of a fortified arc of paranoia, its building set back behind a militarised terrain of berms, mounds and moats, and surrounded by a necklace of some of the most expensive new apartments in the city, whose developers have been eager to cash in on being part of a new high-security “diplomatic quarter”. – (rhetoric london ekphrasis )
- Trump’s Immigration Remarks Outrage Many, but Others Quietly Agree – The New York Times – Watch the Right – (trump politics fascist_rhetoric EU fashion )
- Trump’s ‘shithole’ comment is his new rock bottom – CNNPolitics – One more step toward fascism. The White House is gaslighting. – (politics gaslighting fascist_rhetoric trump )
- ‘Never Trump’ Will Be the Only Faction Still Standing When He’s Gone – The Atlantic – Not mere decorum.
> Insofar as a voter backlash can repudiate the bigot in the White House and his choice to stoke racial and ethnic divisions for power, the country will benefit. – (politics rhetoric trump )
- FBI Agents Sending Anti-Trump Texts Is Not a Scandal – News commentary with irony – (trump rhetoric irony politics )
- [toread] How 6 words got Donald Trump into big trouble today – – (trump politics linguistics )
- Inside Trump’s Hour-by-Hour Battle for Self-Preservation – The New York Times – At a turning point, the NYT reflects. But there are shades of a Hitler regime tamping down opposition and resistance by delegitimization. – (trump politics fascism )
- Yet more proof: Donald Trump is a fascist sympathiser | Richard Wolffe | Opinion | The Guardian – It's in the language. A discourse community identifies its constituents by their language.
>He shares their worldview as easily as he shares their language and videos. He gives their voice and values the biggest platform in politics. He is a neo-fascist sympathizer in the mainstream of American politics, sitting at the heart of the West Wing and world power. – (trump rhetoric politics )
- DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: Introduction Volume 11 Number 3 – special issue.
> This article serves as the introduction to DHQ's Special Issue, "Imagining the DH Undergraduate: Special Issue in Undergraduate Education in DH." Co-editors Emily Christina Murphy and Shannon R. Smith introduce the issue–its signficance, theoretical underpinnings, structure, articles, and case studies. The special issue is organized into four thematic clusters: 1) program models; 2) disciplinarity and DH pedagogy; 3) tool development; and 4) professional concerns. – (DH pedagogy undergrad )
New media in the age of personal growth
- You’re about due for an intervention.
- Art as aide, helpmate, council for personal growth.
- A blog post a day. Two tweets and call me in the morning.
A Motivational Art Intermezzo “Live to be outstanding.” What is new media in the age of the rock ’n roll life coach Anthony Robbins? There is no longer the need to be spectacular. The Situationist critique of the spectacle has won. That would be my assessment of the Anthony Robbins Age in which we now live. Audiences are no longer looking for empty entertainment; they seek help. Art has to motivate—not question, but assist. Art should not primarily reflect, represent, or discover the world but talk to its audience, hit it in the face, so say today’s art marketers. Irony can be a medicine as long as it contributes to the healing process of the patient. Be careful not to offend anyone. Today’s aesthetic experiences ought to awaken the spiritual side of life. Aesthetics are not there for contemplation only. Art has to become (inter) active and take on the role of coaching. In terms of the self-mastery discourse, the 21st century artist helps to unleash the power from within. No doubt, this is going to be achieved with positive energy. Perverse optimism, as Tibor Kalman called it, is needed. Art has to create, not destroy. A visit to the museum or gallery has to fit into one’s personal development program. Art should consult us in transformation techniques and not criticize. In order to be a true experience, the artwork has to be an immediate bodily experience, comparable to the fire walk. It has to be passionate, and should shed its disdain for the viewer, along with its postmodern strategies of irony, reversal, and indifference. In short, artists have to take responsibility and stop their silly plays. The performance artist’s perfect day job is the corporate seminar, building trust and distilling the firm’s core values from its human resources.
Self-management ideology builds on the 1980s wave of political correctness—liberated from a critical negativism that only questioned existing power structures without giving guidance. As Anthony Robbins says, “Live with passion!” Emotions have to flow. People want to be fired up and move out of their comfort zone. Complex references to intellectual currents within art history are a waste of time. The art experience has to fit in and add to the personal growth agenda. Art has to leverage fears and promise guaranteed success. Part therapist, part consultant, art no longer compensates for a colorless life. Instead, it makes the most of valuable resources and is aware of the attention economy in which it operates. In order to reach such higher planes of awareness, it seems unavoidable to admit and celebrate one’s own perverse Existenz. Everyone is a pile of shit and has got dirty hands. Or as Tibor Kalman said: “No one gets to work under ethically pure conditions.” It is at that Žižekian point that art as a counseling practice comes into being. Tired Media Art.
from “Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture” by Geert Lovink
Altruism – Simple as That!
- Invisible, roll-on protection.
- It’s altruism. Really.
- Can I get a witness?
- You have been protected!
How saturated in the 1950s pre-digital era this email from MnSCU is. The pitch is straight out of commercial advertising: protect your home, your family, your innocence. Protect yourself from embarrassing body odor. Even the Civil Defense left it up to the target family to build their own shelters and to take cover in defense.
But the Minnesota State Internet Guardian has you protected. Protected so well you won’t even know it. Because you’re blameless. We trust you. The only reason you would click a shifty link is accidentally. Because you don’t know any better, we monitor your every click for you.
The place for protection in 2017 is the state university. It’s not about us. It’s you.
From: Faculty/Staff Announcement List
Date: December 4, 2017 at 3:20:07 PM Central Standard Time
To: “fac_staff_l@listserv.bemidjistate.edu”
Subject: Minnesota State Internet Guardian
Who: All faculty, staff and students
What: Full implementation of Internet Guardian
When: Tuesday, December 5
Where: BSU, NTC and Distance MN
Why: To protect you from internet threats by stopping malicious links, phishing links and other malicious software from reaching their intended destinations
Complete Details: Your campus will be deploying a service that is being rolled out system wide known as Minnesota State Internet Guardian. This service will help to protect you from internet threats by stopping malicious links, phishing links and other malicious software from reaching their intended destinations. The service and its deployment will mostly be invisible to you as it works at the network level. The only way you will know that it is active is if you accidently click on a malicious link or navigate to a web page that has malicious software on it. At that time, a web page will pop up to inform you that you have been protected. Simple as that!
We can ask why MnSCU isn’t telling students and faculty – each time they click – that their move has been recorded, analyzed, vetted by The Guardian to be OK. Is the silence protection from ourselves? A little pop up with each click could be an affirmation: Good Choice! Gold Star!
The state educational system is extending the same parental protections it brings to the dorms to the network. But they wrestle with their parenting role. They try to cast the control as altruism – a position they are not comfortable with. They can’t hide their apprehension that our use threatens their network. The same apprehension on the face of moms and dads and teachers in 1959 and 1962 when they sketched plans for fallout shelters and held duck and cover exercises. They were doing it for The Kids – knowing that the gestures were nothing more than altruism. We don’t need to be reminded with evert click that the protection is in marketing only.
The Civil Defense banner image is from the Civil Defense Museum. The faculty email shares the same archive. The Cold War prepared us. The same misuse of military equipment can claim guardianship.
McLuhan on the Headline
- Wares and rumors of wares in a time of Trump.
- The story content becomes the merchandise.
[T]he headline is a feature which began with the Napoleonic Wars. The headline is a primitive shout of rage, triumph, fear, or warning, and newspapers have thrived on wars ever since. And the newspaper, with two or three decks of headlines, has also become a major weapon. …
Any kind of excitement or emotion contributes to the possibility of dangerous explosions when the feelings of huge populations are kept inflamed even in peacetime for the sake of the advancement of commerce. Headlines mean street sales. It takes emotion to move merchandise. And wars and rumors of wars are the merchandise and also the emotion of the popular press.
From The Mechanical Bride
Update 11 Dec 2017: Any kind of excitement. In a post-simulacrum world, the quote itself is verification enough.
“Think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.”
Trump, as reported, in the NYT
McLuhan on Picasso Painting
When Picasso enters the popular mind by way of McLuhan:
Picasso’s painting is always exciting because Picasso paints the path of feeling. I am speaking completely literally. Picasso paints the path of feeling.
Did you ever have a teardrop run down your face? Sometime have a teardrop run down your face and feel it run. Feel it run and then you will understand Picasso. Picasso paints a teardrop running down your face. He paints a tragic running down on the ieee , , , just as you would feel it. Then at the end of the running he paints the teardrop . . . as it feels. He paints the path of the teardrop… He paints a path of feeling . . . He paints the path of every feeling he has at the moment he is feeling. A moment later would ba too late.
It is so simple.
Picasso paints a teardrop when it is running down the face. That is all.
Of course he must paint the when. He paints it when it Is running . . . all the way. He does not paint the teardrop itself until it has stopped running. Then the teardrop hangs suspended from the when like it feels on the face.
It is not only of Picasso that I speak. There are others . . . like Miro like Chagall like Mondrian like Brancusi and Braque and Kandinsky and Klee . . . ”
>
from verbi-voco-visual
Remediating Speech in the Museyroom
From Rhetorical Delivery As Technological Discourse
- Getting from Isocrates to McLuhan by way of the Liberal Arts Curriculum
- Who’s tipping whom? Mind yer hats goan in.
- Culture wars
McCorkle explains the transition to writing by rhetorical mechanisms, driven and shaped by rhetoricians, specifically Isocrates. Isocrates becomes the manifestation of the otherwise invisible forces in McLuhan.
What McLuhan sees as a cognitive/cultural transformation, McCorkle explains by the mechanism of remediation, motivated by cultural changes but locally orchestrated by rhetoricians. When the rhetoricians stopped paying attention to delivery, they created a tipping point.
The declining status of delivery was itself a mechanism of remediation, in that it was an attempt on the part of rhetorical theorists to divert attention away from the embodied rhetorical performance and refocus that attention toward words, in and of themselves, as objective components of thought, whatever the medium. In other words, the Greeks had to pay less attention to oratory’s uniqueness as a technology of communication. By paying less attention to delivery, classical rhetorical theory allowed alphabetic writing to embed itself more easily in the cultural practices predominantly occupied by the spoken word alone. Minimizing the importance of delivery helped to blur the material distinctions between speech and writing, naturalizing the written word by erasing its interface. One way of rendering the writing interface invisible was by applying its attributes back onto the speaking body-in effect, making speech more writerly and thereby taking advantage of speaking’s more “natural” disposition. Another was to place writing in a comparatively uncontaminated light, framing it as the intellectually “pure” counterpart to the dangerous, irrational rational nature of the performing body; as Fredal describes the hierarchical repositioning of speech and writing, “Speech appears not as natural but as naturalized, and composition-rhetoric as dependent upon this naturalization for its intellectual stature. Writing disciplines itself by refashioning speech, specifically its non-verbal, performed components, as “organic,” ‘irrepressible,’ and natural” (5). Adhering to the language of Bolter and Grusin’s remediation theory, writing became more immediate (a transparent relay of mental activity) as the attributes of embodied speaking became hypermediated (amplified-and suspicious-attention was placed on the medium-specific elements of speech)…. The culture of writing fostered by Plato, Aristotle, and even Isocrates signaled a change in disposition toward language broadly understood, valuing words-in-themselves (the “pure” state) over words-in-action in-action (the dangerous, contaminated state). This shift in theoretical attitude toward delivery is but one mechanism of remediation, a mechanism reflected in other attempts to remediate alphabetic writing.
A local practice becomes, by McLuhan, a zeitgeist. The common thread between all those who consider the shift to literacy is materiality, embodied performance. Here, the performance of writing becomes embodied in speech. A new practice of logographic is borne.
The practice of logography developed over time to become much more than a means of carrying the unadulterated spoken word for an embodied performance to be delivered later and elsewhere. It was also a contaminating influence on speech. It began to reach back into the materiality of the spoken word, reshaping it so that speech began to take on the attributes we commonly associate with the written word: multiple tenses, embedded clauses, and more complex sentence structures in general.
Speech remediate the attributes of writing. Either (choose one) as a result of a shift in consciousness, or as a cause, or by collocation. Affordances are on the move, and the move is sponsored and carried by The Ten, their written word, and McLuhan.
The presence of writing resulted in more than just a unilateral shift in consciousness. Rather, the process of speech became more writerly and writing became more naturalized owing to a reciprocal, interactive dynamic. The technologies of speech and writing fed upon each other, writing borrowing from the cultural prestige of speech, speech adapting to compete with the newly arrived technology of chirography. At the forefront of this remediating transformation was Isocrates, whom Enos calls the “father of logography,” and who, as one of the Ten Attic Orators, contributed to the growth of the Greek language by bringing ing a notable stylistic complexity to oratorical performance.
Pause for a moment to consider how the teaching-orators are creating and spreading this New Consciousness. Your first-year comp teacher, with her tedious stylistic moves, is the vector of infection.
The development of this complexity owed much to the sort of plastic manipulation of language afforded by written discourse. For instance, Forster describes in the introduction to Isocrates’s Cyprian Orations how the teacher-orator “could manage the period as few Greek writers succeeded in doing. In reading a long sentence of Isocrates we are struck by the fact that, however intricate it may seem, it runs smoothly, and its structure is perfectly clear” (22). Isocrates developed a style of composition that, in part, drew upon oral stylistics and extended them to degrees that likely could not have been developed in purely oral contexts. Forster observes that “the conscious artifices which Isocrates employs”-among them parallelism in sound, homophonic wordplay, and the avoidance of hiatus (a word ending in a vowel followed by another beginning with a vowel)-“though at times they may seem laboured, certainly often add to the clearness of his style” (23). Isocrates also brought uniquely writerly prose to the composing process, an ornateness derived from his use of amplification and highly embedded constructions.
The Liberal Arts foster the literate consciousness by clandestine rhetorical training. Blame the teachers. Pay attention to the figures going out. Tip.
As students grew accustomed to encountering written discourse as a surrogate for speech from the outset of their rhetorical training, the differences between the two media became less distinct.
What I’m reading 27 Oct 2017 – 28 Oct 2017
- Introduction – – (DH undergrad pedagogy )
- Building a Toolkit for Digital Pedagogy – – (DH e-pedagogy embedded_pedagogy pedagogy )
- Digital Oulipo: Programming Potential Literature – – (DH )
- This Is What the Trump Abyss Looks Like – For Trump, hell is other people. For other people, Trump is hell.
> Yes, the forms of the Constitution remain largely intact after nine months. But the norms that make the Constitution work are crumbling. The structure looks the same, but Trump has relentlessly attacked their foundations. Do not therefore keep your eyes on the surface. Put your ear to the ground.
> In a country led by a swirling void, all sorts of inhibitions slowly slip away. Nativism, racism, nationalism: these are very potent catalysts of human darkness. Usually it is the president who takes responsibility when these demons appear to emerge, and attempts to refute, or discredit or calm them. But this one amps them up. – (trump politics existentialism )
What I’m reading 20 Sep 2017 – 5 Oct 2017
- Trump is exposing the contradictions of the elite | David Callahan | Opinion | The Guardian – Apparent from the first, this one took a while to re-surface.
> Trump’s retrograde presidency has revealed the profound contradictions at the top of the US income ladder. In the wake of the president’s various actions toward immigrants and inflammatory remarks on race, we’ve gotten glimpses of a wealthy class with a powerful social conscience and the potential to offer leadership on some of the most divisive social issues of the day, as well as other urgent matters like climate change.
> Yet don’t expect an enlightened new establishment to command moral authority any time soon. That can’t happen until the wealthy and business leaders extend their vision of inclusiveness to the most important sphere of American life: the economy. – (trump politics socialism )
- Donald Trump’s Shocking Recklessness – The Atlantic – – (trump politics race_baiting rhetoric )
- A blunt, fearful rant: Trump’s UN speech left presidential norms in the dust | The Guardian – > With Tuesday’s address, however, Trump punched yawning holes in his own would-be doctrine, singling out enemies, expressing horror at their treatment of their people and threatening interference to the point of annihilation. – (rhetoric trump politics rhetorical_situation )